Satisficing and Seduction; or, Why You Probably Won't be a Bachelor Forever

P-

I can't say I know of other sites that go into things quite the same way we do on GC, but I'm admittedly not the biggest consumer of information out there and I'm sure there are some I don't know about. Some suggestions for sites you may find interesting if you like the stuff on GC:

• Science Daily (science)
• Scientific American (science)
  
• Psychology Today (psychology)
  
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree (popular science)
  
• Paul Graham's Essays (successful entrepreneurship)
• Less Wrong (cognitive biases / logical fallacies)

The closest outright might be Psychology Today. Less Wrong deals with a lot of the tricks your mind plays on you we like talking about here too (and many more we don't or haven't yet). Paul Graham talks about entrepreneurship, but there are a lot of insteresting lessons about what people do in the extreme scenario that is business-building. Science Daily and Scientific American run intriguing pieces on human nature every so often, and Barking Up the Wrong Tree does it pretty frequently.

Lots of interesting things to digest on these sites, and if you like getting a better handle on human nature, they're all wonderful places to do that in their own respects.

Chase

JJ-

Certainly - I can do something on that soon! Would be fun to write.

Chase

Riz-

On the free will vs. predetermination debate:

I was a hardcore free will guy until I started reading neuroscience books, twin study research, and the like.

Neuroscientists who study individuals with various kinds of brain injuries find that those who've lost their ability to make decisions emotionally and must rely on pure logic to run their lives become all but catatonic. That's primarily because "logic" as we're used to thinking of it is the sort governed by emotions, or the sort governed by rules programmed in (to, say a computer program) by someone with logic governed by emotion; without emotion, logic because an infinitely-winding path of infinite possibilities.

In the article on black and white thinking, I discussed research establishing that people lacking emotions who must make decisions on pure logic find themselves unable to choose between a free gift of either a $15 pen or a $15 wallet. The mind begins exploring the infinite scenarios in which one item might be preferred to another, and no solution is ever arrived at. It'd be like asking a computer program to find the optimal path among two different paths with infinite possibilities - it will just run and run forever until the program is cancelled. Without emotion to force a decision, no decision is made.

In "Nice People Need Hard Rules", I linked a video about the time delay of when your brain makes a decision, and when you actually feel that "you" (as in, conscious, aware "you") have made that decision. Consciousness is, science is progressively showing, the observer, not the actor, although the brain allows it to think that it is the actor and feel like it is in control.

That said… we all have different impulses, and different experiences, and different wirings in our brains, and these things all combine us to seek out our end goals in slightly different ways.

Ultimately, it doesn't much matter if we have "free will" or entirely governed by our biology; we're still going to do what we're going to do no matter which is the case. The argument itself is really a pointless one, aside from the sideshow curiosity of understanding what goes on in our heads and how the things we decide really get decided.

As for "settling down", I think your and my definitions of the term as it's defined culturally are pretty similar (as noted in my response to your other comment); it seems like most people view "settling down" as some sort of permanent affair, marriage and partner selection as the most important decision you will make in your life (and one with lifelong effects), and the whole deal as this big, indelible, incredibly serious undertaking. If you're a freedom-seeking person, that feels like others are trying to cage you with this concept, and you struggle to be free. Most people undergo an internal tug-of-war between the desire for freedom and the desire for security, and based on their life experiences will lean more one way or more the other - when you feel capable of getting what you want, consistently, reliably, and to the level of quality you desire, you embrace freedom; when you feel incapable of this, you chase security. It sounds like you are at the point (and I am too) where too much "security" is very constraining and controlling.

The big question is, have you sufficiently accounted for your biological drives and addressed them in such a way that you haven't missed anything that might creep up on you later and arm-bar you into security seeking, or is there one you've missed? I think this is the thing the discerning freedom-focused man needs to be focused on - making sure he's addressed all of the potential deep-seated biological needs that might at some point or another commandeer his mind and emotions, so that his needs remain in alignment and he never starts feeling insecure and engaging in security-seeking behavior that curtails his freedom and finds him limited and constrained.

Chase

JT-

Marriage is a risky proposition these days, I agree. Everyone goes in thinking his marriage will be perfect and last, and while half the time he's right, the other half he's got it all wrong. Not every marriage that ends ends with the man getting royally screwed, but a number of them do, and there're enough horror stories about these going around that enough men are starting to be more cautious.

Then again, many men who marry do so because they are emotional over a woman, and that woman has the power in the relationship - these are also the scenarios in which the woman is most likely to divorce the man and take him for a financial ride. No amount of lecturing, educating, or chastising men seems to be able to help, because these men are making emotional gut decisions, and are in the weak position going into the marriage - they're unable to demand prenuptial agreements because it would enrage their fiancées (and we can't have that), and they're unable to say "no" to marriage itself because they would lose their partners (and their world would come to an end).

Unfortunately, for the majority of men marrying, they're marrying because they're in the emotionally compromised and needy position, and they will keep making the same mistakes, and paying for them, again and again. So long as women hold power over their men, and demand marriage, and demand it without prenups and other protections, men will comply, and be reamed later.

Any guy who controls his own income stream (e.g., runs his own business, or can incorporate where he receives his pay in any way) I normally advise moving his assets over into a trust while he's still single. Because a trust is an independent legal entity without ownership, anything placed into a trust prior to marriage can't be touched by the other party in the marriage, regardless of contracts between those two individuals. If a vindictive / ruthless divorcing wife wants to extract value from her man, the best she can try to do is find out what benefits the man is receiving from the trust (i.e., how much pay per month) and fight to get a share of these.

The other suggestion here for men who know they want marriage is to seek their partners and marry outside of progressive, pro-divorce societies and keep their wives out of these societies (as social norms tend to be contagious to those living immersed in them). Divorce culture like that you see in the United States is rare, shameful, and nowhere near as one-sided in much of the rest of the world, where social support networks for single women aren't nearly as pro-singledom.

Chase

Breeze-

I'm not sure if I'd call them "cultural" so much as "environmental" factors that increase the divorce prevalence as much as they have in the West. Whether you view this as a good or bad thing depends on your perspective and station in life (e.g., for an attractive, financially successful man, a mate who's passed her reproductive years divorcing him and taking some chunk of his assets, but freeing him to pursue a young mate and produce further offspring with her, will be emotionally trying during the divorce period and asset recovery period following it, but ultimately leaves him with a greater number of progeny than he'd have had he and his wife remained together until death did them part, from reproducing with both the first wife and any subsequent wives).

When you examine why people do things, it's best to look at their environment; e.g., someone's a lot more likely to become a drug addict if he grows up in a listless, hopeless, unsupportive environment where drugs are cheap and available and drug use is prevalent than he will be if he grows up in a stimulating, encouraging, progress-oriented environment where drugs are rare and no one he knows uses them. In the case of marriages staying together, in the West the three pillars of marriage stability have gone away: economic necessity, social stigma, and poor replacement partner options. That is, traditionally in monogamous communities, females need males for economic support; are stigmatized as undesirable and flawed if they have cheated or divorced their husbands; and have a great degree of difficulty finding remotely acceptable replacement partners once they've lost their first. It's why you'll read so much Victorian literature about the tragic widow who manages to find love with a wonderful man again; the fantasy of the day was that even if she somehow lost her man, a woman might be able to find another high quality man again. It was a fantasy that sold many books because it was so unlikely.

In the West today, women can support themselves and their children with jobs without a man; they sometimes get generous divorce settlements and alimony payments that give them tremendous freedom and leeway right up until they find a replacement partner (so don't have to worry); face no social stigma, and even a good amount of encouragement for divorcing; and due to the big, permissive metropolises we live in, and the merry-go-round of modern marriage, with so many men and women constantly getting on and off the ride, an abundance of acceptable-enough replacement partners is available (even if a woman can't get as amazing a man at 45 as she could at 25, she can still get one who's sufficiently okay; and if she's become bored or resentful enough of her current spouse, a "good enough" alternative who will treat her better, or a buffet of different new men to sample again, can start to look pretty darn appealing).

I think most partners in the dominant position have always grown tired of their mates over time; the difference is that in the past, a woman would struggle to find ways to reengage her husband out of fears of losing him, while today's woman is more inclined to pout and feel entitled to a better relationship, because there are no external forces that compel her to do otherwise. I've seen this play out with long-term girlfriends in the West vs. long-term girlfriends in non-Western countries; the Western ones are ready to throw in the towel and move on as soon as your interest starts waning, while the non-Western ones view this as a call to action to step up their game and find a way to keep you. You might say this is a result of the commoditization of men in the West; a good man is a precious thing outside the West, but in the West he's a lot more replaceable due to environmental reasons.

Women being passive-aggressive is part their default personality, and sometimes also part a reaction to how controlling or not they feel that you are. If you want to minimize this behavior, seek out very confident, rational women, and give them relationships where they feel free, and in which you freely encourage them to air their grievances and punish them for passive-aggressiveness. The freer a woman feels with you, the more direct she'll be, and the less passive-aggressiveness she'll employ (some women, no matter how non-judgmental and open you are with them and how much you encourage them to air their grievances and show them nothing but calm consideration when they do though, will always feel insecure and resort to passive-aggressiveness, simply because they are insecure individuals; that's where screening comes into play).

Unwarranted cockiness is an ego-protective mechanism, and a side effect of low self-awareness. It's the result of taking praise from others at face value. Truly confident individuals who are also self-aware will have a mixture of high confidence / arrogance, modulated by self-awareness that reminds them that for everything they are good at, there are tons of other people out there who are much more talented than they are. Most of the women I date tell me things like, "I don't care about men," rather than, "I can get any man I want," and they tend to do pretty well with men, but also have long stretches where they don't date, too. I like this a lot, because these are women who aren't validation seekers; they don't have Facebook accounts full of orbiters, and tons of men texting them all day. They still always have a few chasing after them, but they get turned off by weak men pretty quickly and tend to get snippy with their orbiters for being weak and cut the guys off. I'd define that as "real confidence" versus the validation-seeking ego protective version of confidence that the majority of women (and men) exhibit. The need for large amounts of external validation of one's qualities stems from a feeling of inadequacy, often because a person isn't really exceptional in any key way, and hasn't done the work to make herself exceptional, so needs to surround herself with a shroud of validation to prop up her sense of self-worth. In this sense, your reaction to women like this as a turn off is actually a correct read of their quality as mates; you're reading their behaviors and saying, "I don't buy it."

Chase

JT-

Hard to say with absolute certainty, but from what I can tell, while social media has opened up discussion channels, it hasn't contributed to the quality of the discussion much or at all. Most of the information you see getting disseminated is the same stuff you would know about any way in a social circle; e.g., you see that Angela is partying and hitting the clubs and looking sexy; you see that Joe is still drinking with his buddies and skateboarding on the weekends. You have NO IDEA that Joe and Angela met randomly and had sex at a party Saturday night, and that now Angela's pissed off at Joe because he kicked her out inelegantly and doesn't want to see her again. Despite the new means of communication at your and everyone else's disposal, the actual details of what you know about others' lives aren't really all that different now than they would've been 20 years ago, even though it FEELS like you have much more of a window into their lives (instead of just hearing about how Angela goes clubbing sometimes, and running into her on occasion in the nightclub, now you can see the photographs of her clubbing adventures on Facebook).

As for what women tell their friends... it varies by the girl, but most women prefer to tell their female friends stories about men trying to sleep with them and failing than they do stories about their actual sexual exploits (because the former builds them up as both desired AND hard to get, while the latter risks painting them as loose and low value, which can threaten their friendships, position within the hierarchy, and social status). It's become a bit more common to talk about these post-Sex and the City, but the majority of women who aren't hardcore partiers (and even many of those girls) seem to prefer not to kiss and tell. Most of the women you see who kiss-and-tell are low status within their social groups; the closer to a leadership role a woman has with her friends, the more carefully she minds her reputation, including how "easy" she seems to be.

I don't have much experience dating in small towns, but from what I've seen of female social circles, the low status girls will typically complain to the high status girls about liking you or sleeping with you but not being able to get you to agree to see them again, while high status girls will remain tight-lipped even if they have the same complaints. Another two reasons for this, in addition to the ones above, is that higher status women who admit to things like this will encourage lower status women to both a.) start chasing after the men that they like (if the higher status girl endorses him, then he'll be a FIND if the lower status girl can snatch him away), and b.) use him as an opportunity to snipe at the higher status girl and status jockey with her for positioning within the hierarchy.

Due to the reticence of higher status women, I'd expect there to be limitations on how much of a player reputation you get if you can stay discrete and avoid sleeping with too many lower status girls who will go blabbing about the experience to anyone who will listen, but that's just extrapolating general female group dynamics to a small town environment and I can't say for certain. You're more likely to end up sleeping with lower status women on average, just because these girls are faster to hook up and care less about their reputations, and it's hard to be totally discrete in small communities where everyone's watching everyone, so it might be that for practical reasons, despite your best efforts, you're inevitably going to acquire a reputation that will make it harder to land the higher status girls (but possibly easy to land the lower status ones, especially if you have known exploits with a few of the higher status ones, and the lower status ones who are talking about you have exciting things to say).

Chase

Awesome. Thanks, Anon!

Chase

BD-

Thanks for the share. Anon's comment (just above yours) was sharing a link by Mark Colyvan with the same numbers in it (37% probability of finding the best mate). I'm sure one of these papers draws on the other, but haven't read them through carefully enough to see which is which (or look at dates of publication to figure that out).

There's some interesting details in these papers I don't recall reading about, like missing the best mate during the sampling period (a problem that every guy or girl breaking up with a wonderful first or second partner has to deal with: what if I've lucked out and found the best possible mate for me on the first try, and I never find anyone else better than this?), and the chance that you get a run of weak candidates and undervalue your mating possibilities, settling for a lower caliber partner (because she's better than the other low caliber partners you got during the sampling period) and settling down into a suboptimal commitment.

Funny how much a role math plays in even things like mate selection... an area where most people don't even realize they are playing a numbers game to that extent!

Chase

Anon-

Very good that you found the article a good read, and coinciding with your budding beliefs.

The story on Barack and Michelle Obama is a good one. There's really no way to know who was more correct, either; on the one hand, Barack Obama's family, education, and career had pretty much been steering him toward the U.S. presidency from infancy. On the other hand, Michelle Obama was clearly no slouch herself. I think that one might be a case of two people with a common objective and similar trajectories coming together and enabling them both to get there.

There's a lesson there I think for anyone seeking a partner: seek out one with a similar trajectory to yours, who will be able to cooperate with you to reach it jointly, and not oppose it, compete with it, or try to pull you in a separate direction.

Chase

Deliberater-

Wonderful - thank you for commenting with this.

Amazingly, all three individuals who commented on this one provided a different and very informative link. There's some really good stuff in each of these links... I might try to do another post devoted just to this at some point (once I've had time to properly go through it all).

Chase

Anon-

I'd advise getting into a conversation with the two of them, and asking them how they know each other. I have many times met girls who seemed to be with boyfriends, only to discover the men they were with were only their friends - often, these girls are some of the easier girls you will sleep with, mostly because they don't get approached by men (since they're always with a guy), and they often end up being pretty cute, too. You seem quite bold in approaching them when they're with a man, compared to all the men who never do.

And the worst that can happen is you find out they're a couple, and you're polite and conversational, and wish them well and take off again a few minutes later.

Chase

Phil-

If you've had a week or so pass, and last told her to text you, and the vibe between the two of you was strong, your best bet is to follow up with a phone call. You look a little weak if you asked her to text you, then end up texting first yourself, but if you call her on the phone, since that's a different mode of communication you don't have that effect, and you can get into some real conversation as well.

For the meet up, everything sounds good, except that I might recommend getting her to come to somewhere closer to your place if you can swing it. A 20-minute drive to your parents' place when she could just drive 20 minutes to go home can seem hard to justify unless she's really feeling it; but if you're 10 minutes from your folks' place, and 30 from hers, it's a lot more likely to feel easier to just come and chill there with you ("It's only 10 minutes away") than it is to drive all the way back home; besides, she's only tacking an extra 20 minutes onto her roundtrip commute, rather than an extra 40 minutes if they're 20 minutes away.

If that isn't possible though, just meet her at that Starbucks halfway between and make the date an amazing date - then invite her back with you on a high point as the emotions are building and building and before she's ready for the date to be over.

Chase

JJ-

Part of it is where you're starting out at - the more supportive a childhood you had, for instance, the less work you've got to do to get solid internally - but the biggest part beyond how far into the race you find your starting line is is what you do to get yourself the rest of the way.

For instance, there are guys I know who are great at picking up women, and have been with hundreds of different girls, who are still complete and utter messes internally because they haven't handled things like how to really integrate with other people and form meaningful long-term friendships and relationships, and they've never managed to get good at consistently getting high caliber mates and retaining those mates in long-term mutually supportive relationships.

I think being solid internally is about feeling like other people truly appreciate you as a person, and will go to bat for you if you absolutely need them to, and believing that deep to your core. If you want to get solid internals, you need to be focused on becoming someone who provides value to other people, and someone whom other people just like being around and value as a friend and companion. Without that, there's always a hole there that you can spend forever trying to fill with all manner of unfulfilling things. There's also the danger of approaching things too transactionally, and trying to up the transactional value you provide to others and get better at extracting the same from them; you end up with messed up internals this way, because life is nothing but a constant struggle to extract more value from other people while minimizing the amount of value extracted from you.

I might say then that the quest for great internals is one about learning how to get more and more and more people around you to be loyal, genuine friends, rather than people you're in search of value from or who are in search of value from you. The better you are at this, the more everything else tends to sort itself out, since most internal problems are really fears and mistrusts directed toward the other people around you; and, if you can get to the point where you feel quite safe in trusting the other people around you and having them trust you, these problems go away.

Chase

Boyo-

Hmm... I haven't actually sat down and given this a whole lot of thought, and I'm pretty sure the stages of learning to pick up girls are exactly parallel with the stages of learning any other challenging new skill. If I had to list out stages for this offhand, I'd say:

1. Brand new: it dawns on you that this is a skill to learn... and suddenly the world seems filled with new promise, excitement, and unlimited potential

2. Into the thick of it: going out religiously, and coming to grips with the realization that this is way harder than you thought it was going to be... you thought you'd be able to just snap your fingers and be doing great, but now you're starting to realize how completely unskilled you are, and how very far away you are from where you'd like to end up

3. Grinding: you've come to terms with your lack of skill, dealt with the painful emotions your insufficiency meted out to you, and now you're over it; now you're just grinding. You're just doing basic exercises again and again, focused on developing a base level of proficiency. You suck, and you aren't getting results, but that doesn't matter; what you're focused on is inching your way up, bit by tiny bit

4. Initial success: you've started experiencing some initial success (slept with a girl off of pickup). This is your first real "breakthrough" period; this is where you've found that yes, you can make this work for you too. Once you've had some initial success, it's pretty common to get a few more successes in a row (sleep with a few more girls within a few weeks or months off of pickup)

5. Post-success plateau: you hit a plateau where it feels like you can get girls on occasion, but the really high caliber girls are few and far between, and it sort of feels like you're able to get roughly the success of an "okay" natural guy, only with a lot more work than he puts in to get that success. There are still a lot of guys out there who do far and away better with women than you do, and aren't even doing a fraction of the work you are. It starts to feel like maybe this is as good as you're going to get... and that wouldn't be horrible, but it would be kind of disappointing, considering how hard you've worked. A lot of guys get a decent girlfriend and check out of the game at this stage

6. Commitment to grinding: if you don't wife up a pretty-good girl at this point, you end up reaching a point where you say to yourself, "You know what? Screw it. I'm going to buckle down and do whatever it takes to get great at this." Most of the other guys who started learning game at the same time you did have dropped out by now, so you're among a select, dedicated crowd. You realize you've been more or less coasting since you started getting that initial success, and begin taking a more methodical approach to your game again, akin to the one you had back in your pre-success grinding days. You start biting off bits and pieces and tackling your game in a small-improvement-by-small-improvement way once more

7. Major breakthrough (abundance): the major breakthrough comes when you have some watershed experience where you realize that you can pick up a sufficiently cute girl any time you want, so long as you go somewhere with enough different women to meet and you have enough time to keep meeting new girls there. This is the moment when you really feel you've "made it"; you're never going to worry about not being able to get laid again, and you will always be able to have sex with a new girl whenever you want to do it. There aren't many men who stay at it long enough to reach this point, and you're one of a small class of "enlightened" men who can now look at dating, relationships, pickup, and seduction candidly and see them for what they are, rather than trying to delude yourself with fairy tales to protect yourself from an uncertain reality

8. Post-breakthrough soul-searching: the next stage comes when you realize that you can get laid whenever you want, but really amazing, soulmate-caliber girls are still a rare event to you. You start to wonder if maybe you should settle down if you have a girl like this, or if you should start searching for a girl like this. No amount of sleeping with ordinary new women can come close to matching what it's like having a single exceptional girl like this. This is the point where many experienced seducers drop out of the game and pair off with one of those rare high caliber women

9. Commitment to grinding again: if you stick with it, you commit to grinding again, this time with the objective of perfecting your game to such a degree that you're able to not just get laid whenever you want - that's old hat - but now, to be able to find, attract, and sleep with the highest quality women out there: the ones that make your heart flutter and beat fast, and get to a place that you can meet these women easily and regularly, and actually get them as easily as you get ordinary girls

10. Major breakthrough #2 (absolute abundance): if you reach this point, the most amazing women in the world are yours. Sure, you don't get every woman you set your eyes on... but you can meet girls who are your dreams girls in relatively short order, and get them quite consistently. The idea of picking one girl and permanently settling down feels crazy to you, because you'd be missing out on so many other of your dream girls out there. You're at a place now where the highest heights of pickup have been reached

11. Deciding how to use your skill set: finally, you start deciding what you want to do now that there's not much new frontier to conquer; sure, you can try things like cold approach threesomes, or picking up girls on airplanes mid-flight and sleeping with them then and there, or find some other way to challenge yourself, but the real question is what do you want to do with your life?: do you want to construct a harem of women? Start having children with different girls? Live the life of the perpetual bachelor, unmoored and truly free of roots and responsibilities? Something different?

12. Acceptance of skill and moving on in pursuits: once you've decided what path you'll take over the long-term, you stop working too much on pickup, and it just becomes something you do and a part of your life, and not something you think about. Now that you've learned a challenging skill to a high degree, you know the skill-building process inside and out, and you can use that to expedite your learning with another skill set. You begin to turn your energies toward something else, like building writing, art, or building businesses

That's the rough progression. Plenty of dropping out goes on along the way, but there are tons of rewards for the few men who stick with it all the way through. Realistically, most men won't; not necessarily because the rewards aren't worth it to them, but because they're satisfied enough with what they get at the lower levels, or they don't really believe in the potential rewards enough to justify the large amount of work it takes to actually get there.

Chase

Anon-

That's a great tragedy, but I can happily say that it wasn't me on that plane, nor anyone I know (so far as I'm aware). Perhaps one of these days, though... you never do know.

Chase

Dante-

If I could come up with any solid / non-anecdotal evidence, I could do a piece on these. Unfortunately, there's so little hard evidence of these sorts of claims, and so much that's easily dismissed as confirmation bias or just chance, that it's difficult or impossible to do something all that credible on it.

Almost everything I can cite from personal experience can easily be written off as confirmation bias or pure chance. One example I used to use was that when playing certain computer games as a child and older, I had a much better chance of successfully making a very difficult shot if I did so with my eyes closed waiting for what felt like "the right moment" than I did with them open. For a long time I thought this was some sort of extrasensory perception, but what I noticed later was that this only worked if I watched the movement patterns for a few seconds before closing my eyes; I couldn't do it at all if I shut my eyes immediately without watching the screen for a few minutes first. I think what's happening here is that the brain is calculating the patterns in the game, and lets you know when to take the shot in order to make it; closing the eyes just shuts off the distractions and lets you listen to your internal calculations better.

Precognitive dreams are stranger, yeah. I've had a few of these that have been pretty precise, and history's chock full of important figures with them, from George Washington, who claimed he saw a vision of an America with iron buildings that reached up to the sky in a moment when he was close to despairing that drove him on, to Abraham Lincoln dreaming of his own assassination and speaking of it to a bodyguard, to the precognitive dream that saved the life of Adolf Hitler and cleared him out of a foxhole that was bombed minutes after he left it, killing everyone else asleep inside. I don't really have any ideas about what sort of mechanism might be required for something like this to exist, or what possible explanation there might be for these things otherwise. I also haven't much investigated them; maybe these claims are just urban legends, or aren't well-substantiated, although they do seem to be pretty ubiquitous among "great figures."

Miraculous healing is an intriguing subject in its own right. Some percentage of cancers - some oncologists speculate even up to a third of all cancers - go into spontaneous remission on their own; the body just realizes it needs to fight the cancer off, or figures out how to. Because of this, you get all kinds of people saying their cancer was deemed incurable, and then they took X alternative medicine and that cured it, therefore X medicine is a cancer cure that everyone should use, and other people use that cure and die. So, I'm a little wary about talking about willing yourself to better health unless this can be well-substantiated; I did have a number of persistent smaller scars disappear after spending four or five months willing this to happen, but only got rid of the larger ones following cortisol injections by a dermatologist. I've had a few other health issues that made sudden reversals once I started focusing on them, and had the opposite happen too - it seems like every time I think to myself, "Hey! I haven't had a pimple on my nose in forever!" I immediately the next day have a pimple there - but maybe that's just my conscious mind becoming aware of something my subconscious already knows is going on. And I had a coworker once who'd been given a few months to live with an incurable liver cancer, but who had a miraculous recovery after she took up Buddhist meditation and began to focus on inward healing. There are plenty of other miraculous healings that occur with no focused attention on that area of the body.

Now, if we could get one of those spiritual healers, like a saint who does the laying on of hands and cures all kinds of health issues, and have a team of medical researchers verify this is actually happening, that would be pretty impressive. The current evidence today is not in favor of this though: "Medical Miracles Not Supported by Evidence."

Anyway, this is one where I have a great deal of curiosity, but nothing but ambiguous things to report... and I don't want to add to the confusion by making a lot of exciting-sounding-but-wild-and-unsubstantiated claims to the mix!

Chase